Then London has aboard a sealing schooner in 1893 and spent 7 months sailing the North Pacific, where he acquired both the nickname, "Sailor Jack" (Bryan 1811). Which it was use proudly in his hobo days and the knowledge of the brutality of seafaring that provided the background for one on his famous works, "The Sea Wolf" (Dyer n.p.g). .
Then traveling back to San Francisco, London found some steady work, first in a salmon cannery, then in a power station shoveling coal for ten hours a day. He found employment as a physical laborer brutal to mentally debilitating, but he was determined to stick with it. The after that he rose to the position of an electrician, then at the age of eighteen, he joined Western contingent of Coxey's Army. Which was of ragtag band of unemployed working men. After that later in Niagara Falls, New York, he was arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to a month in the Erie Country Penitentiary. Then from that experience, London claimed the crucial autobiographical essay " How I Became a Socialist" (Junior n.p.g). Which proved a turning point in his life and converted him to socialism. Now convinced the need for a normal education, London entered Oakland High School to prepare himself for college exams, cramming the same energy that he used for shoveling coal. He also published his first stories in the schools library magazine, The Aegis. In addition, he joined the Socialist labor party and threw himself into the activities, by gaining a degree of notoriety as a sheet corner crater, " The Boy Socialist of Oakland," as the newspapers styled him. He was arrested for violating a city ordinance against public street meetings and this was prove to be successful and making him a hero to the local radicals. Nevertheless, he remained a socialist for over twenty years.
The compressing years of study into a few months, London passed his college exams and entered the University of California at Berkeley in 1896.
